Roundup: Sunday Potluck Edition

Sunday was always potluck day where I grew up, so I hereby present to you this glorious covered casserole of links I didn’t get around to posting this week. With a few fresh ones stirred in, just to keep you guessing.

Retired general compares Bush to a deserter: “By vetoing this bill and failing to initiate an immediate and phased withdrawal, the President has effectively gone AWOL, deserting his duty post, leaving American forces with an impossible mission, suffering wholly unnecessary casualties,” argues retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom.

The pet food recall has widened again now that evidence of cross-contamination has surfaced. In English, that means contaminated wheat gluten getting into food that’s not even supposed to contain wheat gluten, most likely because equipment wasn’t cleaned properly. Meanwhile, “The FDA has expanded its investigation to include livestock feed that contained tainted pet food and made its way to some 6,000 hogs and as many as 3.1 million chickens.” Me, I’m liking the countryside here in beautiful Vegetaria especially well at the moment.

This is brilliant: Erin Davies’ “fagbug” campaign. Her VW bug got vandalized with homophobic graffiti, so she’s going to drive it across country with the graffiti intact as an awareness campaign. Click through for photos.

Tea drinkers may have a lower risk of certain skin cancers, according to a new study. “In a study of nearly 2,200 adults, researchers found that tea drinkers had a lower risk of developing squamous cell or basal cell carcinoma, the two most common forms of skin cancer. Men and women who had ever been regular tea drinkers â€” having one or more cups a day â€” were 20 percent to 30 percent less likely to develop the cancers than those who didn’t drink tea.”

No idea if there’s any truth to these persistent rumors or not, but I agree that if there were they would certainly be newsworthy. And they sure are persistent.

New Zealand-based author, NZBC blogger, and friend of Ocelopotamus Chris Bell has relaunched his Web site â€” with more than 30 of his thoroughly unpredictable and unclassifiable short stories available for reading, as well as poems and other writing. He even provides a recommended soundtrack of music to read his work by. And his “radical, free content approach” to the site includes an offer to mail a free PDF copy of his stories and poems to anyone who wants to print them out for reading on the train or other unplugged locations. Stop by and partake of his generosity.

Aaron said: “I noticed that it didnâ€™t say the tea protects against melanoma, which is the worst of the skin cancersâ€¦so people probably shouldnâ€™t go rubbing olive oil on themselves and sunbathing just yetâ€¦”

Yes, the article definitely says this is not an excuse to forget one’s sunscreen. But it is a reason to feel good about drinking tea.

I’m thinking FAGBUG will be a hot topic NATIONWIDE over the next few months. I’ve blogged about Erin also — I am curious (after receiving a comment to the effect that) Does anyone think Erin may have done the spray-painting herself in a “planned” PR stunt? Personally, I don’t believe she’d do that. What do YOU think?

No, personally I don’t think the idea that she did it herself is plausible. Just on an instinctive level, she strikes me as sincere. But also, I think you have to apply Occam’s Razor here: the idea of her doing it herself is much more far-fetched than the idea of her getting vandalized, since similar incidents of vandalism are all too common and have been documented many times. Vandalism is the much simpler and more likely scenario.

And also: I think the campaign she came up with is the kind of thing you come up with in a moment of anger, a trying to make lemonade out of lemons sort of thing. It’s not so much the sort of thing you think up when you’re cool and collected â€” it’s a creative response to a problem (like when people donate money to gay causes every time the Fred Phelps clan shows up to picket somewhere).